Destiny 2 is dead, but still crushing Marathon on Steam

Destiny 2 has been officially dead for three months now. No more updates, no more seasons, just a game left to rot gracefully. And it’s still beating the pants off Marathon, a game Bungie is actively pouring resources into.

Numbers from SteamDB put Destiny 2 at 10,155 concurrent players right now, with peaks of 17,712 in the last day. That’s not a one-off spike either; peaks between 17,000 and 22,000 have been the norm for a good while. A corpse of a game outperforming something with a pulse.

Marathon’s numbers tell the real story

Marathon, meanwhile, struggles to break 3,000 concurrent players on Steam, and Season 3 is on the horizon. Consoles probably aren’t picking up the slack either. Do the maths, and Destiny 2, dead and buried, still has close to five times the audience of a title Bungie is actively supporting.

I liked Marathon. The art direction and worldbuilding are genuinely strong, some of the best Bungie’s put out in years. But strong visuals were never going to fix the fact that it’s a niche extraction shooter fighting for scraps in an oversaturated genre. Even at launch, it only pulled 88,000 players, nowhere near the 167,000 Destiny 2 hit on its actual final day, proving there was still plenty of juice left in that lemon.

So Sony and Bungie killed the game people still show up for and doubled down on the one barely anyone’s playing. That’s not a business decision I can wrap my head around.

Bungie’s shrinking on every front now, subletting its HQ, shutting down the game that made it, and propping up a shooter that might not see out the year. Whatever’s next for the studio behind Halo, it isn’t looking like a comeback story.

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